‘The Bone Man’

A fa­mil­iar fig­ure at Here­ford Mar­ket in the mid-20th cen­tury was Ed­die Drew ‘the bone man’. He farmed near King­ton on the Welsh bor­ders and on mar­ket day he would hire a room at the mar­ket pub, the Wheat­sheaf, and tend to peo­ple’s in­juries. “He’d get them down on the ta­ble and straighten their back, legs or arms and charge them half a crown,” re­called auc­tion­eer Gra­ham Baker. “And if we had a prob­lem with an an­i­mal in the mar­ket we’d pop up and say: ‘Mr Drew can you come and look at this?’”

Ed­die Drew came from a long fam­ily line of heal­ers and was re­puted to be re­lated to ‘Sil­ver’ John Lloyd, the bone­set­ter of Rad­nor For­est.

Ac­cord­ing to folk­lore, Sil­ver John re­fused to take money for his bone set­ting and in­stead ac­cepted to­ken sil­ver but­tons, which his wife sewed into his favourite waistcoat. In the late 18th cen­tury, Sil­ver John was mak­ing his way home from mar­ket at Builth Wells when he was set upon and mur­dered. Nei­ther his waistcoat nor his mur­der­ers were ever found. Ac­cord­ing to the words of a lo­cal song: “Sil­ver John is dead and gone, So they came home a-singing. Rad­nor boys pulled out his eyes